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Nuke waste site fee to end

New York — A fee that electric customers have been paying for 31 years to fund a federal nuclear waste site that doesn't exist is going away.

The Energy Department will stop charging the fee by court order on Friday. The amount is only a small percentage of most customers' bills, but it adds up to $750 million a year. The fund now holds $37 billion.

Wisconsin electric customers won't really notice any change in their utility bills from elimination of the nuclear waste fund fee.

Over the years, utility customers across the country, including in Wisconsin, have paid a small surcharge on their monthly bills to help pay for that site — long planned for Yucca Mountain in Nevada until the Obama administration canceled the project.

Wisconsin utility customers stopped paying into the fund after the state's utilities sold off the Kewaunee and Point Beach nuclear plants, both located southeast of Green Bay on Lake Michigan.

Customers of We Energies have paid $215.2 million into the fund.

Customers of utilities based in Green Bay and Madison paid more than $103 million into the fund, including $44.7 million for Wisconsin Public Service Corp., $42.2 million for Wisconsin Power and Light Co. and $16.3 million for Madison Gas & Electric Co.

The money was collected to build a long-term disposal site for the radioactive nuclear waste generated by the nation's nuclear power plants that is, by law, the federal government's responsibility.

The site was supposed to have opened in 1998, but there is no such site nor even any tangible plans for one.

Utility customers should not expect a refund of the fees. The latest Energy Department strategy is to have a site designed by 2042 and built by 2048 using the money in the fund.

The fee, a penny for every 10 kilowatt-hours of electricity, is charged to nuclear operators and then passed on to customers. Based on the average amount of nuclear power produced across the U.S., a typical residential customer pays $2 a year into the fund.

This has long bothered state regulators. The National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners began suing the Department of Energy in 2010 to force DOE to stop collecting the fee.

"We never objected to paying the fee when there was a program," said Michigan utility commissioner Greg White, who has been fighting the fee for years. "But people shouldn't be paying for something that doesn't exist."

In a sharply worded opinion last fall, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia agreed, calling the DOE analysis of the fee collection "absolutely useless." The court also noted that there may be enough money in the fund to build a dump already: "The government apparently has no idea."

In 2002, Congress approved Nevada's Yucca Mountain as a site for a national nuclear waste dump and $9.5 billion was withdrawn from the fund to develop the project, according to the Government Accountability Office. But the project has been criticized as inadequate and flawed and is fiercely opposed by Nevadans. President Barack Obama, fulfilling a campaign promise, cut funding for the program, withdrew its license application and dismantled the office that was working on it.